How We are Being Ripped Off on ICOs

[daox]

Imagine that you have a money box that costs $1 and you put a hundred dollar bill in it. Would you then sell this money box for $30? Of course not. So, how come that the market cap of the project that has collected $15M turns out to be less then $5M in a month after the end of the ICO? The answer is that instead of the money box all the funds goes into the pockets of the founders. 

Almost every today’s well-advertised ICO is there to make profits by selling the tokens, not to achieve long-term goals. Do you really think that founders really care about the value of their tokens on on exchanges? Of course not, as they have already done their business—they got money from the investors. They do not have any responsibilities, however they will still claim that the project is going well.

Have you ever thought that founders could spend somewhere about 30% of all the raised funds for the promotion of their ICO? And that VCs are easily getting discounts up to 70%? This is all because founders do not have to care about the post-ICO period, and they are not really motivated to make their project a success.

The question is whether we (the crypto community) will put this to an end or not? Good news is that we definitely have the power to do it with implying the great concept that has been here for some time now—the decentralized autonomous organization. Why not use a DAO as an intermediary between the startups and their investors? Each ICO could be a separate DAO, with all the raised funds residing in that DAO.

This is pretty much like the approach proposed by Vitalik Buterin earlier this year, which has  never been widely used though. The reason for that is that not only we should have the protocol, but this protocol also needs to be well-trusted by the community and therefore widely adopted. Those startups that imply DAO-based ICOs should receive more attention from investors, while others would need to justify not using it.

Imagine that the tokens that you buy are literally backed by the raised funds, and startup team is highly motivated to do their best to make their project a success. If the majority of investors are unsatisfied with the results (say the token price on exchanges will go way lower than the ICO price) they could simply vote for the refund. This is the ICO 2.0 solution powered by the community-driven open-source Ethereum protocol proposed by the Daox Foundation (https://github.com/daox).

So it's in the favor of the crypto community to decide whether we keep ICOs fair and widely accessible for the masses or we just give it up for the variety of crypto funds and venture capitalists (who no doubt will find the way to secure their investments). But does it comply with the nature and the initial idea of ICOs — to make investing and fundraising easily accessible for everyone in the world?

What do you think guys?

[personxw]

Have you ever thought that founders could spend somewhere about 30% of all the raised funds for the promotion of their ICO? And that VCs are easily getting discounts up to 70%?

This is so funny to hear from someone who is actually running an ICO themselves.

[oaks05]

you just have to distinguish the good icos from the bad yea alot of them are there for a quick book but there are good project outs there that try to accomplish something.

[tk808]

This environment was created from greed and ignorance.

There's nothing that can stop it, other than the investor who puts forth the money for these ICOs. Even then, there will always be someone who gets duped, and therefore, there will always be malicious ICOs.

The difference between a good ICO and bad ICO is the intentions of the creators. You can define it by how much profits/losses, how big and etc etc, but none of that really matters if the intention is to screw people over in the end.

[daox]

you just have to distinguish the good icos from the bad yea alot of them are there for a quick book but there are good project outs there that try to accomplish something.

That's right, but even VCs can't do this with 9 out of 10 startups. Some teams who doesn't have an MVP but still might be worth investing in have very few chances to succeed on the current market. Investors are more likely to pay attention to the projects that have a lot of hype.

[daox]

This environment was created from greed and ignorance.

There's nothing that can stop it, other than the investor who puts forth the money for these ICOs. Even then, there will always be someone who gets duped, and therefore, there will always be malicious ICOs.

The difference between a good ICO and bad ICO is the intentions of the creators. You can define it by how much profits/losses, how big and etc etc, but none of that really matters if the intention is to screw people over in the end.

Agreed. In "real world" investments it is very hard to screw investors because their interests are secured by the contracts and the law of the country where the startup company is incorporated.
In the crypto space, this contract is supposed to be the smart contract, and the company could be a DAO. It would be way much harder to screw people if the funds are escrowed by the majority.

[Raist]

You can not roll mincemeat back. All this ICO stuff shows that kickstarter and venture funds are not enough for common guy investment and those possibilities will never go back to venture capitalists entirely. In other words Nash parity has moved somewhere we just need to understand where-))). And ICOs.... soon there will be no stupid guys with money here. It is like with new cryptocoins - today there are less new projects comparing to 2015 for example. Will be the same.

[daox]

You can not roll mincemeat back.

But we can stop making it -)

...and those possibilities will never go back to venture capitalists entirely.

Of course not entirely, they will take only the best ones.